Chapter 23
May came up the gulch green.
Olivia had not known it could. She had seen the place only in snow, then in the brown weeks after, when the snow went and left the boards bare.
Now the creek ran loud under the church.
The aspens on the far slope came out all at once, in a day, like a lamp turned up.
There was grass on the mine road. The wheel turned above it in a sky so blue it hurt.
On the second Sunday, after the service, the reverend did not let the congregation go.
"Stay a moment," he said. "The doctor has asked for something. I have said yes, and you may as well see it done."
They stayed. Olivia stood up from the pew in the middle on the left and went to the front. Charles went with her. Between them, in a new blue dress that Olivia had cut down from her own second best, went their daughter.
Their daughter. Olivia had said the word to herself every day since the tenth of April.
On that day the judge at the county seat had read the petition, looked at the child, asked her one question, and signed.
She said it now, standing at the front of the church with the whole camp behind her.
It did not get less strange. It got less strange to say.
"I married these two in December," the reverend said. "They said the words. I am not sure, looking back, that either of them meant a great deal by them. I am going to ask them to say the words again. This time I am going to ask them to mean it."
Charles turned to her.
He took her hand. His was cold. It always would be, she thought. She would have thirty years to warm it. The thought went through her like the creek under the ice.
"Wilt thou have this woman?"
"I will," he said, and it was not terms. It was a promise.
"Wilt thou have this man?"
"I will."
She meant it the way she had meant nothing in her life. Not as a contract. Not as service. As a promise chosen freely by a woman who had a key on the inside of her door and had not turned it since March.
Antonia stood between them and held both their hands. She looked at the congregation with her chin up, the way she had looked at the camp children in the hall in September. Only now she was not counting doors. She was counting faces. Olivia felt her fingers tighten, once, on the word wife.
"Then I bless what God has joined," Josiah Bowen said. "And I'll thank this town to remember that it was joined here, in front of them. I have witnesses."
Harriet, in the front pew, said, "Amen," loudly enough for the rafters. The church laughed, and it was done.
* * *
Eugenia Pemberton came to the house on the Tuesday.
She came on foot, alone, without the carriage. Olivia saw her from the kitchen window, coming up the steps cut into the hill with a bundle in her arms. She went to the door before the knock came.
Mrs. Pemberton stood on the porch in her dark green. The mourning brooch was at her throat. She held a stack of schoolbooks, six or seven of them, old and worn at the corners, tied together with a length of blue ribbon.
"Mrs. Aldridge. I would like to speak to your daughter, if she is at home."
Olivia took her in. Then she stood back from the door.
Antonia was in the parlor with the atlas. She looked up when Mrs. Pemberton came in. She closed the book and stood because she had been taught to.
Eugenia stayed on her feet. She stood in the middle of the parlor with the books against her chest. Olivia, in the doorway, saw her gather herself the way she had gathered herself at the mantel with the good china. Then saw that she could not.
"These were Teddy's," she said.
Her voice was not the parlor voice. It was the one from the hall.
"His readers, his sums, his geography, which he hated.
He was nine. An engineer, he was going to be, and build a railway over the pass so that nobody would ever be shut in again for a winter.
A foolish, talkative, loving boy. I have not said his name aloud in this town for three years, because if I said it, I would have to hear that he was gone. "
She held out the books.
"I would like you to have them. You are a scholar, the doctor says. I would like them to be read by someone who will read them."
She stopped. Her gloved hands tightened on the ribbon.
"And I would like to ask your pardon, Antonia.
For the mercantile. For the church. For the letter.
For every day since September that I looked at you and saw a thing to blame.
Instead of a child who had lost her whole family in a night, as I lost mine.
I knew what that was. I, of all people, knew. I am sorry."
Antonia took the books.
She held them the way she had held the atlas that first night. Then she looked up at the tall woman in green. Olivia saw her come to a decision, as she came to all of them, all at once and for good.
"He'd have liked the rat hole," Antonia said. "If he wanted to build railways. It's a good hole. It comes out exactly where you need it."
Eugenia Pemberton made a sound that was not a laugh, not a sob, and somehow both. Then she sat down, quite suddenly, on the settle, with her hands over her face. Olivia went and sat beside her. She put an arm around the iron-straight shoulders and said nothing at all.
Antonia went to the kitchen and put the kettle on. She had learned that from Mrs. Aldridge.
* * *
Toby Griggs walked her to school.
He had not been asked. He was simply at the foot of the steps on the Monday after the hall, with his arm in its sling and his sandy hair wetted down. Without a word, he fell in beside her. Down Silver Street, he walked at her elbow to the schoolhouse gate.
Every day after that, he did it. When the sling came off, he still did it.
"You needn't," Antonia said, on the third day.
"I know."
"I'm not afraid of them."
"I know that too." He kicked a stone. "I'm not doing it for you."
She thought about that. It was probably true, she decided, and let him.
At the gate, the first morning, there had been a knot of the younger ones by the fence.
One of them had opened his mouth. Toby had stopped.
He had not said anything loud. He had looked at the boy, twelve years old and big for it, and said quite quietly, "Say it.
Go on. Say the old name. I'd like to hear it. " The boy had shut his mouth.
Nobody said the old name at the schoolhouse gate again. Not where Toby Griggs could hear.
Miss Perrin, at the door, watched them come up the yard together each morning and said nothing either. But in March, she had moved Antonia's seat to the front, next to her own desk. She had begun setting her sums the oldest boys could not do. And she had stopped touching her collar.
* * *
The brass plate went on the surgery door in the last week of May.
The old one had said C. ALDRIDGE, M.D. Charles took it off himself, with a screwdriver, on a Saturday morning.
Olivia stood on the porch with Antonia and watched him do it.
The new one was smaller. It had cost four dollars at the county seat.
He had drawn the lettering out for the engraver on the back of a prescription slip, and had not shown it to either of them.
The screws went in. He stood back.
It said ALDRIDGE. Nothing else. No initial and no letters after.
"There are three of us," he said to the door. "It seemed simpler."
Olivia had no answer to that. Her eyes stayed on the plate a while, then went to him. Then she went in to see about the dinner. If she had stayed on the porch a moment longer, she would have made a fool of herself in front of Silver Street.
The Pemberton east drift went back to work in May, with new timber from the crosscut to the face. The count on that side was cut to what the ground would carry. Hollis saw to the timber himself. Horace Pemberton paid for it without a word, which was his way.
The camp wives came that summer.
Not all at once. But they came. The ones who had crossed the street in October came up the steps with a child by the hand and a cough to be listened to.
If the doctor was out, they did not go away again.
They sat in the waiting room, on the bench.
The doctor's wife came through the curtain with her sleeves rolled and bent to the child.
Beside her, with a notebook, a pencil, and gray-green eyes that missed nothing, came the girl.
"Open," Antonia would say. "Wider. Now say ah."
And the child would say ah. The mother would sit on the bench, not pulling her skirts aside, and wait.
Not all of them came. Two of the six who had signed under Eugenia Pemberton's name never climbed the surgery steps again.
They took the train to Leadville for their drops, four hours each way, and crossed Silver Street when they saw red hair coming.
Galena Springs had believed a story for a winter.
It did not unbelieve it in a week because a hall had told it to.
But the bench filled, most days. A bench was enough to go on with.
* * *
The porch faced west, and in the evenings the mountains went gold.
They sat there when the surgery was quiet, the three of them, on the plank step with the door open behind them.
The kettle ticked on the stove. Charles at one end.
Olivia at the other. Antonia in the middle, with the atlas, or the notebook, or one of Teddy's readers.
Sometimes with nothing at all. Only sitting, with her back against Olivia's knee and her boots on the step below.
Not folded small. Only sitting.
"I have been thinking," Olivia said on such an evening, with the peaks going from gold to rose, "about the advertisement."
"Which advertisement?"
"You know very well which. The one in the Boston paper.
I read it again last night. I keep it in my writing case with the others.
" She watched the light on the mountains.
"It asked for a sensible woman. That was the whole of it, once you took away the doctor's words.
A sensible woman of good character, to make a motherless girl a home. "
"It did."
"You made no mention of the mountains going that color.
Nor the creek. Nor a girl who could read Latin off a bone chart.
Nor a town that would come and stand in your hall to speak for her.
Nor any of this." She moved her hand, a small movement, taking in the porch, the step, the child against her knee, the gold on the peaks.
"I think you undersold it, Charles. A sensible woman might have wanted to know. "
His answer was slow in coming.
She looked at him, and found that he was not looking at the mountains.
He was looking at her. He had been, she thought, for some time.
The way he looked at her when she read, the way the child had written down in her notebook in January under Observations.
Carefully. As if he had begun to count, had lost count, and did not mind.
"I asked for a sensible wife," he said. "That's true. It was what I thought I wanted. It was all I thought I could bear."
The last of the gold went off the peaks.
"I was sent a home instead," said Charles Aldridge.
Antonia, between them, said nothing. But she reached up to the tin button on its ribbon, where it lay pinned above Olivia's heart.
She turned it once in her fingers, and let it go.
Then she leaned back against her mother's knee and watched the mountains go blue. She did not think about spring at all.
There was no need. Spring had come and gone. Nobody had told her to have her bag.